What are we doing about the pandemic? It’s not exactly a trick question. But it’s tricky because pace Yogi Berra, unless you know what you’re trying to do, you will probably do something else.

At one point we knew. We were trying to contain then eradicate SARS-CoV-2 because we thought it was as deadly as it was contagious, including “flattening the curve” to protect the health system from its initial virulent onset. But it does not make sense to continue to act in this manner once we realize it is quite contagious but not as lethal as originally feared.

Decades ago in Is Reality Optional? Thomas Sowell wrote “Very few problems can or should be solved, in the sense of wiping out every vestige of them — not even crime or disease. Would anyone really spend half the Gross National Product to wipe out the last vestige of shoplifting, or every minor skin rash?”

Very few problems can or should be solved, in the sense of wiping out every vestige of them

Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?

Would we spend half of GDP to wipe out the last vestige of COVID-19? Perhaps, if we thought the alternative was to see one in 20 of us die, vital services collapse etc. We might also tolerate sidelining Parliament, mass unemployment, and the prime minister handing out half a billion dollars a day in unexamined spending while telling bureaucrats to ignore fraud despite a deficit likely to exceed $300 billion and push borrowing above total revenue.

When we thought this illness combined the contagiousness of the common cold with the consequences of the original 2002-04 SARS, such conduct made sense. Not any more. But we’re having trouble shaking off the mindset.

Tuesday’s Post had the usual “experts say” we’re reopening too fast, without a detailed plan, without the “outbreak under control.” And “to open up effectively, you need to know you can detect and squash any new cluster before they can explode.”

You would if it was the Plague, Black, Justinian or otherwise. Maybe even the Spanish flu. But it’s not. It’s nowhere close.

People line up at a mobile COVID-19 testing clinic on May 19, 2020, in Montreal.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press

So let’s try some evidence-based decision-making. The National Post tweeted Saturday that “Four out of five COVID-19 deaths have been linked to seniors’ homes. That says a lot about how Canada regards its elders.”

Incorrect. It says nothing about how we see our seniors, regard our elders, look at old people or your euphemism of choice. Rather, it says people in seniors’ homes are old and very unwell. Which you already knew especially if, like me, you watched two grandparents and a parent die in one.

That statistic also says all our precautions have been useless in protecting them. Perhaps if we had tried to quarantine the vulnerable rather than the everybody. But I doubt it. The disease apparently got into seniors’ homes via the medical system because people who are very unwell go to hospital a lot.

The disease apparently got into seniors’ homes via the medical system

Thus the most important thing this number tells us is COVID-19 poses little threat to people who are neither old nor sick. So little that when it first got into the hospitals, nobody noticed.

It’s not new information by now. But it’s not getting through because of the early fixation with disaster scenarios based on bad computer models and wild overestimates of IFR. We thought half of us would get it and at least one per cent of them would die.

The latter part at least is not true. It never was, but early on we could not know it. Now we can. Instead, our dangerous obsession with perfect safety has us still talking of building a wall, keeping it out, beating it in two years. What would it take to keep out flu? Beat the common cold in two years?

A scientists works on a potential vaccine for COVID-19 at Cobra Biologics in Keele, England, on April 30, 2020.Carl Recine/Reuters

Exactly. So what should we be trying to do about SARS-CoV-2? Not make sure nobody ever dies of it. Not flatten the curve to protect the health system. We already did, postponing many other needed procedures to brace for a tsunami that wasn’t coming.

NBC just claimed the pandemic is a “neon light” to bioterrorists because “the West has trouble testing, tracking and treating a pandemic or sustaining a supply of protective equipment for health-care workers.” Not if we think sensibly and change our behaviour. Which we’d better anyway because I’d like to know how “experts say” we’re going to meet the next pandemic, natural or not, if we’ve destroyed the economy, public finances and our health in a foolish attempt to eradicate this one totally.

As Sowell also wrote, “The anointed don’t like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy ‘solutions’ that get rid of the whole problem …” But reality is not optional. And as long as we’re trying to avoid any negative medical results from a plague, we’re going to keep digging and end up in a hole deep enough to bury the economy and the budget. And for what?

Bill Buford spoke about moving to Lyon with his family for a year to write Dirt, and then staying five, about their lives now in New York, and the future ...

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